Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
The Rhetoric of Inferiority of African Slaves in John Fawcett’s Obi; or,
Three-Fingered Jack (1800) Re-evaluated
in Charlie Haffner’s Amistad Kata-Kata (1987)
Ulrich Pallua
Copyright©2014 Ulrich Pallua. This text may be archived and
redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided
that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is
charged.
Abstract: John Fawcett’s Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack (1800) draws a distorted picture
of the life of slaves in Jamaica. This paper investigates the ambivalence in this
distortion as Fawcett creates two kinds of slaves by pitting them against each other: the
loyal and obedient slaves (but still inferior) vs. the superstitious-ridden and rebellious
slaves deeply rooted in old traditions, thus considered inferior, uneducated, immoral and
dangerous. The juxtaposition of what I call ‘anglicised’ slaves instrumentalised by the
coloniser and the heathen ‘savages’ that are beyond the reach of the imperial ideology
enables Fawcett to substantiate the claim that Christianity successfully promotes slaves
to ‘anglicised’ mimic men/women who are then able to carry out its mission: to
eradicate the pagan practice of obeah, three-finger’d Jack, and all those slaves that
threaten the stability of the coloniser’s superiority. Charlie Haffner’s play Amistad
Kata-Kata (1987) is about the heroism of Shengbe Pieh and his fellow slaves on board
the La Amistad: on their way to the colonies they revolted, were sent to prison, tried,
finally freed, and taken back home after 3 years. The paper shows how Haffner
repositions the ‘Amistad trope’ in the 20th century by effacing the materiality of the
body of the African slaves, thus re-evaluating the corporeality of the colonised slave in
the 19th-century post-abolition debate by coming to terms with the cultural trauma postindependent African collective identity has been experiencing. The re-staging of the
play by the ‘Freetong Players’ in 2007/8 commemorated the bicentenary of the abolition
of the Atlantic Slave Trade, a unique opportunity to direct the attention to asserting the
identity of ‘Post-European’ Africa.
Keywords: Slavery Studies, Post-European Identity, Body, Materiality, Ideology
The 18th Century: The Self-Appointed Image of Britain as an Idealized Nation
Identity as a marker distinguishing different European nations/rivals from each other
was particularly relevant when applied to the contact with non-European
countries/colonies. According to Greene, the English “had retained their identity as a
96
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
free people by safeguarding their liberty through their laws.” i The acquisition of
colonies and the trade in people around the globe catapulted the concept of British
identity to a whole new level as “… liberty…not only remained the ‘hallmark of
Englishness’ but rapidly became the emblem of Britishness.”ii British identity not only
connoted liberty but also “Protestantism, social openness, intellectual and scientific
achievement, and a prosperity based upon trade,”iii a combination that corroborated the
image of Great Britain as the leading nation in the civilizing mission of ‘other’, nonEuropean countries.
Scrutinizing images of African slaves created by the imperial ideology in the contact
zone is most essential to understand how they came into being and, most importantly,
how they influence modern thinking in terms of national/cultural/ethnic differences and
divergence. Particular emphasis in the analysis of the plays featuring African slaves is
laid on the national identity of the British Empire in creating ‘auto’ and ‘hetero’ images,
whose frequent reiteration successfully familiarized the British public with the character
of the ‘non-familiar.’ When attempting to come to terms with European/British attitudes
towards the ‘other’, it is thus of vital importance to subject the “negative connotations
surrounding black and blackness”iv in the images of African slaves to close scrutiny.
The(se) attitude(s) towards “black bodies” provided the foundation for the
categorization of a black African identity, an identity divergent from what was
perceived as the white European norm. Sanchez-Eppler avers “if the body is an
inescapable sign of identity, it is also an insecure and often illegible sign.” v Taking this
assumption as a starting point, it is crucial to shed light on how British playwrights
instrumentalised the insecurity and illegibility of the black body and forged a rhetoric of
its inferiority, which obstructed “the inscription of black…bodies into the discourses of
personhood.”vi Denying black bodies the status of a person led to the strengthening of
the mastery of the European over the African body as being “annihilated…a person is
owned, absorbed, and un-named.”vii The absorption of the body leads to the absorption
and dissolution of an old and the creation of a new identity. Kathleen Wilson defines
identity as “a historical process, rather than an outcome, a negotiation between
individual conceptions of self and collectivity and their social valence.” viii The soformed collective identity of Britons was made to contrast markedly with the collective
identity of Africans. Britain thus provided the cultural benchmark against which African
identity was assessed. The problem with the conviction that Britain “stood high for
liberty” is that “national characteristics…function as commonplaces – utterances that
have obtained a ring of familiarity through frequent reiteration” rather than through its
“empirical truth value.” ix This high regard for liberty, that is the empathy towards
Africans who enslaved by the British Empire were manumitted by Britannia sailing
across the Atlantic to unfetter the poor slaves, was ultimately embedded in the territorial
control of colonies and their subjects. The image of the free slave thus served the
purpose of advancing ameliorist tendencies rather than true emancipatory interests.
Nussbaum calls it a “manipulation of abolitionist impulses to advance
imperialism…Sub-Saharan Africans become more clearly recognizable as prototypical
subjects of slavery through the process necessary to identify them as eligible for
freedom, a process that also, ironically, increasingly racialises them.” x The
communicative strategies used to spread Britain’s love for liberty and thus her contempt
for tyranny and violence were “an important propagandistic means of nurturing the
culture’s dominant fictions.” Distancing Britishness from the ‘otherness’ of non97
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
European nations “strengthened a sense of Britain’s superiority that was based on the
principle of inequality.”xi
This paper analyses John Fawcett’s xii (1768-1837) famous Obi; or Three-Fingered
Jack, a pantomime that deals with the rebellion of Jack and his followers involved in the
magic of obi. The discussion of the play will reveal the range of interpretative
possibilities regarding the ‘cultivation’ of images: even if the theatre “became a vehicle
for abolitionist sentiment”, they still served as a vehicle to reinforce or harden images of
African slaves people had in mind. It was not only “a sentimentalized site for resistance
to the evils of slavery”xiii but also a site for the confirmation of already existing biased
views of non-European people, a justification for the evils of slavery, and thus an
approval to the British civilizing ‘mission’. In a second step, Charlie Haffner,
playwright, songwriter, and oral historian,xiv repositions the ‘Amistad trope’ in the 20th
century by ‘re-semanticising’ the materiality of the body of the African slaves and their
leader Shengbe Pieh in particular. Amistad Kata-Kata re-evaluates the corporeality of
the colonised slave in the 19th-century post-abolition debate by coming to terms with the
cultural trauma post-independent African collective identity has been experiencing. The
recuperation of their own (African) history during the colonial period comprises
commemorating the effacement of the African body by the European coloniser and
confirming the African body in establishing a ‘modern’, 20th-century/21st-century ‘us’.
Haffner makes sure that the national identity of Sierra Leone ‘witnesses’ the “’rememory’ of the past as well as the validation of the past.”xv
A Rhetoric of Inferiority: The Anglicised Slave(s) vs. Native Barbarism
John Fawcett’s Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack (1800) opened at Colman’s Haymarket on
2 July 1800. It is based on “Jack Mansong in Benjamin Moseley’s Treatise on Sugar”
(1799) but also echoes “the Maroon communities of Jamaica…with whom the British
authorities had been forced to sign a peace treaty in 1739, and who had gone to war
against the British in 1795-6.”xvi An immediate hit, the pantomime was running “for 39
performances that summer; it played 20 times the next year and 15 times in 1802.”xvii
Set on a plantation/Montego Bay in Jamaica in 1780/1 the story opens with the arrival
of the English Captain Orford who has come to visit his father’s best friend, the Planter.
He is introduced to the Planter’s daughter Rosa who is celebrating her birthday with the
slaves. After the Captain has retired, the celebration is spoilt by the announcement that
he has been shot at by Three-fingered Jack, who got his name after a fight with Quashee
where he lost two fingers. Convalescing in the Planter’s house Captain Orford vows
eternal love to Rosa. Later while on a hunting expedition with the Planter, Captain
Orford is attacked by Jack and abducted into a cave. A declaration offering “one
Hundred Guineas, and Freedom to any Slave who brings in the Head of Three-Finger’d
Jack” xviii induces the slaves Quashee and Sam to go in search of Jack and Captain
Orford, but not without Quashee being christened before – changing his name to James
Reeder. Rosa, who accompanies them, finds Captain Orford in the cave and rescues
him. A fight ensues between Quashee, Sam, and Tuckey, Captain Orford’s slave, and
Jack who is eventually stabbed and decapitated by Quasheexix. The pantomime closes
with a sweeping march and procession celebrating Jack’s death and Britain’s victory
over the villainy of obi.xx
98
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack is an excellent example of how the imperial ideology
forged a rhetoric of the inferiority of African natives by drawing a distorted picture of
the life of slaves in Jamaica. By denying Jack and his followers the status of persons
within the ideological discourse Fawcett creates a hetero-image that stresses their
inferiority in contrast not only to the white Europeans but also to the ‘anglicised’
natives that once converted are misused to hunt down their own people. Fawcett pits the
slaves against each other and creates two groups, the loyal and obedient (but still
inferior) vs. the superstitious-ridden and rebellious slaves deeply rooted in old
traditions, and thus considered inferior. In the opening scene the cruel fate of being
enslaved is decried,
The white man comes, and brings his gold
The slaver meet him on the Bay
And, oh, poor negro then be sold,
From home poor negro sails away.
Oh, it be very very sad to see
Poor negro child and father part
only to then add,
But if white man kind massa be,
He heal the wound in negro’s heart. (Obi 204)
The benevolent and feeling master who refrains from punitive measures turns into the
authority that protects the obedient slaves from their rebellious counterpart, slaves
branded as the enemy not just by the white man but also their own ‘Europeanised’
brothers and sisters.
We love massa - we love massa, when he good,
No lay stick on negro’s back
…
And save us from Three-finger’d Jack. (Obi 204)
Jack is therefore identified as the common enemy of both the master and his slaves.
Jack is not just an individual character they intend to wreak revenge on, but the
embodiment of obixxi, of the evil wretchedness of the slaves rebelling against white
civilization. Waters identifies Jack as being the cause for white fear “with his
continuation of African cultural practices and traditional religion,” a fear that induces
white vengeance, “the riposte to black revolt.”xxii But before this evil world of ‘savages’
living in the wood is introduced, it is the happiness and frolicking of the Planter’s slaves
that the pantomime focuses on, in particular when describing the march and procession
of the slaves: “Eight Negro Boys, in pairs, with Triangles – Six Dancing Girls, in pairs,
with Bells” when Rosa “distributes presents to the Slaves of ribbons, handkerchiefs.”
(Obi 206) This rough sketch of the slaves’ life on the plantation, that is obedient slaves
working for a benevolent master whose attitude towards the slaves abounds with
empathy, is somehow blurred by the fact that the moment Jack comes into play, the
Planter reprimands the slaves for their “cowardice“ and “temerity.“ (Obi 207) It is
neither the Planter nor the Overseer who are supposed to hunt Jack down, but the
99
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
obedient slaves. The Overseer reminisces about their past days in Africa and appeals to
their sense of duty:
Swear by the silver crescent of the night,
Beneath whose beams the negro breathes his pray’r
Swear by your fathers slaughtered in the fight,
By your dear native land and children swear.
By doing so, he apportions the blame for the ‘miserable’ condition of the slaves on Jack
and the ritual of obi rather than on the fact that, even if treated ‘humanely’, they are still
exposed to the malice of the Planter.
Swear to pursue this traitor, and annoy him
This Jack, who daily works your harm,
With Obi and with magic charm
Swear, swear you will destroy him! (Obi 207-8)
They are thus instrumentalised to denounce the magic of Obi and Jack’s resistance to
conform to European oppression. The outsiders within the slave community, Jack, the
Obi Woman and the “Negro Robbers”, are therefore characterised as most despicable
creatures endangering the supposedly peaceful slave community. The cave of the Obi
Woman is described as “covered with rushes and straw. The whole of the walls are
entirely covered with feathers, rags, bones, teeth, catskin, broken glass, parrots’ beaks;”
the Obi Woman is described as “an old decrepit Negress, dressed very grotesquely”
(Obi 209). The ostensible inferiority and baseness of Jack, his followers, and the Obi
Woman, the lack of anything remotely resembling Western culture, religion,
experience, moral values stands in stark contrast to white society, which is not the
Planter, the Overseer or Captain Orford but the ‘whitened’ devotees, that is the slaves
Quashee, Sam, and Tuckey. The image of the savage ‘obi-ridden negroes’ posing a
threat to ‘white society’, which also comprises the obedient slaves, runs counter to the
image of the aforementioned ‘civilized/christened’ slaves. When Jack finally wounds
Captain Orford, drags him into the cave, and lets out a yell of triumph, it is as if a
ferocious animal retreated to the cave with its prey. This ‘monster’ in human form can
only be overpowered by a Christian act: empowered by Christianity the newly
converted Quashee “crosses his Jack’s forehead, and tells him he has been
christened;” Jack is literally disarmed and lets his gun fall. Wounded by Tuckey’s gun,
Quashee stabs and decapitates him. The baptism empowers him to free his fellow slaves
as well as the Europeans from the constraints of obi. The pantomime closes with a
“Grand March and Procession” (Obi 218) which displays the “Obi Woman” and “Jack’s
head and hand” being successfully subdued by superior colonial ‘morality’ and conduct.
The slaves have been instrumentalised in overcoming their traditions and cultural
heritage, here stigmatized as a threatening force to the order of society. Eventually,
order has been restored,
Bring good news to Kingston town, O.
O no fear Jack’s Obi bag,
Quashee knock him down, O,
…
100
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
The negro now may go
For charm he broke, and Jack he kill
‘Twas Quashee give the blow,
…
Here we see villainy brought by law to short duration
And may all traitors fall by British proclamation (Obi 219)
It is the British moral imperative for liberty that not only saves the loyal slaves from
morally degenerating, but also elevates them to a higher status by bestowing on them
the Christian doctrine of justice in combatting heathenism and the culture of the ‘other’,
that is their very own culture.
Amistad Kata-Kata: A ‘Post-European’ Re-evaluationxxiii
Amistad Kata-Kata premiered at the British Council in Freetown, May 1988. It recounts
the Amistad event of 1839-42 where a group of Sierra Leonean slaves led by Shengbe
Pieh mutinied and killed captain Ferrer and his cook Celestino on the La Amistad
(‘friendship’ in English) bound for Puerto Principe. Horrified by the prospect of being
chopped to pieces and eaten by the white man, they took charge of the ship and forced
the two Spanish seamen Ruiz and Montez to take them back to Sierra Leone. Misled by
the two Spaniards into believing that they were sailing back to Africa, they were
actually sailing westward. They were finally captured by an American ship, charged
with murder and jailed in New Haven, USA. When the case went to the Supreme Court,
former President John Quincy Adams assumed the Africans’ defence and won the case,
with the slaves eventually boarding the Gentleman for Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Haffner’s play features a second narrative plot with “grandma” who is upset about the
“student’s” ignorance of the story of Shengbe Pieh as part of the national history of the
country. Grandma represents the oral tradition passed on to the younger generations
with the student who “[...] relies on the usual Western representations in books rather
than on the cultural reality around him as the validating source of his own cultural
experience.” xxiv Grandma reminds the student of Pieh’s importance for the country,
“Our people have still not seen the importance of using him as a symbol of national
pride.”xxv When summoned by the Chief Priest, the ghost of Pieh appears and retells his
story of his being captured and sold into slavery.
Haffner instrumentalises the Amistad trope to make Africans aware of the postcolonial
gaze on their own identity by “[...] recuperat[ing] marginalised subjects, or,
alternatively, [by] dismantl[ing] all racial categories by showing their
constructedness.”xxvi He recuperates marginalised characters like Three-Finger’d Jack,
and de-silences the past by re-evaluating the history of African(s). He gives a voice not
only to Shengbe Pieh and the other slaves but also to Sierra Leoneans so that they can
look back at the past and come to terms the “constructedness” of the imperial story, a
single story xxvii that after being continuously repeated had and still has a profound
impact on how auto- and hetero-images influence intercultural relationships. In Amistad
Kata-Kata Haffner uses arguments most slave trade/slavery supporters fell back on in
their argumentation: the fact that the inner-African slave trade played an essential part
in the actual selling of slaves and the superstitiousness of the African slaves. Celestino’s
joke of the cannibalistic devouring of the black man by the white coloniser unleashes
101
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
the mutiny and Shengbe’s determination to free his brothers from slavery: “I swear that
I will never surrender to the white man. None of us will be left in slavery. We rather die
fighting. God be with us” (AKK 10). The act of regaining their freedom means that the
body acquires new significations as “[t]he body which has been violated, degraded,
maimed, imprisoned, viewed with disgust, or otherwise compromised [...]” xxviii is
viewed from a different perspective, transforming the trope of Africans destined to be
enslaved into the postcolonial agent of his/her own identity:
Part of the project of redefining staged identity is to affix the colonised’s
choice of signification to the body rather than to maintain the limited tropes
traditionally assigned to it. This oppositional process of embodiment
whereby the colonised creates his/her own subjectivity ascribes more
flexible, culturally laden, and multivalent delineations to the body, rather
than circumscribing it within an imposed, imperialist calculation of
otherness.xxix
The recuperation and ‘re-semanticisation’ of the past therefore allows for the
resurrection of a national/cultural African identity long forgotten, suppressed or simply
neglected. One might ask why Haffner is commemorating the Amistad revolt. It is
because the “use of historical knowledge in interpreting the present”xxx does not only
‘interpret’ but also ‘re-define’ identity in the sense of redressing wrongs and ‘refocalising’ the frozen and distorted vision colonial history had turned into reality. “So
whether the past is mythical or implied objective, its validity lies in the position it
occupies in society’s shared consciousness or collective memory.” xxxi
Haffner for instance uses the colonial trope of cannibalism to show how it was
instrumentalised to emphasise the alleged inferiority of the slaves. It exposes not only
the slaves’ superstitious belief in the cannibalistic rite of whites enslaving, killing, and
eating slaves, but it also illustrates that Africans are allocated a place low on the ladder
of civilisation. When the crowd in New Haven yells, “Stop the pirates!! Capture the
cannibals!! Save the white race!! Down with savagery!! We are not safe!! Our life is
threatened!! We can’t sail our own ships!! We can’t go fishing!!” (AKK 13), Haffner
alludes to the general absurdity of the situation, highlighting the mutual manipulation of
the two bodies – black/white, colonised/coloniser, black cannibals/white cannibals –
thus ridiculing the semanticisation of Europeans/Americans vs. Africans. Matthew J.
Christensen interprets the trope of cannibalism as a “symbol for the economic
exploitation, material accumulation, and violent coercion carried out by postcolonial
elites”. xxxii AKK is Haffner’s revolt against the West “project[ing] the label of
cannibalism onto those Africans it wants to subordinate, thereby disavowing the
cannibalistic underpinnings of its own racially stratified economic organization.”xxxiii
Haffner thus uses Shengbe to determine the postcolonial gaze that is (supposed) to
‘rewrite’ colonial history and to amend this otherness, for instance when Adams
compares him to a hero of “ancient Greece and Rome”, the “Black Prince” (AKK 17).
[...] had he lived in the days of Greece and Rome, his name would have
been handed down to posterity as one who has practiced the most sublime
of all virtues – disinterested patriotism and un-shrinking courage. Had a
white man done it, they would have immortalized him. His name would
have been made glorious...Africans...are entitled to their liberty...Africans
102
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
were born free and are entitled to their freedom...It demands, from a
humanly civilized nation as ours, compassion. It demands, from the
brotherly love of a Christian land, sympathy. It demands, from a republic
professing reverence for the rights of man, justice. (AKK 22)
It is this ‘civilizational’ aspect of the West supposed to instruct the poor Africans that
the three abolitionists in the play, Tappan, Leavitt, and Joselyn, capitalise on when they
claim that
[t]hey are ignorant of our language – of the uses of civilized society and the
obligations of Christianity. It is under these circumstances, that several
friends of human rights and abolition of slave trade have met to consult
upon the case of these unfortunate Africans and appointed a committee to
employ all the necessary means to secure the rights of the accused. (AKK
16)
The abolitionists have faith in Jones as they want to see “[...] if a man, although he is
black, cannot have justice done him here in the United States of America” (AKK 16).
They hand over a letter to Jones, declaring that “[m]any of the Africans can, now, read
and write...This has been part of the committee’s effort – to provide for their physical
well being and their intellectual and religious instruction” (AKK 17). That is when
Shengbe and his fellow slaves submissively declare that “[...] he [Mr. James Covey]
teach us to sing Christian songs in Mende language” (AKK 17). Here we are provided
with the confirmation of the coloniser’s attempt at justifying the enslavement of
Africans: being enslaved and transported to the colonies implies effacing their identity
by reproducing their ‘bodies’ and turning them into ‘European’ bodies. Their accusation
of the inhumane treatment of the African peoples is combined with the belief in God’s
punishment of such an immoral behaviour.
We all born in Mende country...Some people say, Mende people crazy.
Mende people dolt, because we don’t talk America language. America
people don’t talk Mende language. America people dolt? Dear Mr. Adams,
you have children. You have friends. You love them. You feel sorry if
Mende people come and carry them all to Africa...We sorry for America
people great deal, because God punish liars...Mende people have got souls.
All we want is make us free. (AKK 17)
The accusation of the immoral behaviour of the coloniser in treating the colonised is
encapsulated in President Adams’s question “[...] what can [he] do for the cause of God
and man – for the progress of human emancipation – for the suppression of the African
slave trade?” (AKK 18). The recuperation and ‘re-semanticisation’ of the past is a
process that implies resurrecting a national/cultural African identity long forgotten,
suppressed, or just simply neglected but at the same time “interpreting the present”xxxiv
by ‘re-defining’ identity in the sense of redressing wrongs and ‘focalising’ the distorted
vision colonial history turned into reality. According to Osagie, “so whether the past is
mythical or implied objective, its validity lies in the position it occupies in society’s
shared consciousness or collective memory.”xxxv The past is therefore ‘re-semanticised’
in order to define ‘us’ and not ‘us’ vs. ‘them.’
103
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
Summing up, John Fawcett’s Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack helped forge a rhetoric of
inferiority by corroborating the fact that ‘black bodies’ would only be considered
worthy of attention if servile to the imperial dogma of white English superiority. It
denied black bodies who were still deeply entrenched in the practice of obeah and thus
running counter to the Christian principle of the superior British Caucasian `race` the
status of a person. The strengthening of the mastery of the European over the African
body led to the creation of a new colonial identity: ‘Europeanised’ slaves who eradicate
the pagan practice of obeah, three-finger’d Jack, and all those who threaten the stability
of the coloniser’s superiority. Charlie Haffner’s Amistad Kata-Kata challenges this
rhetoric of inferiority by rewriting the story of the Amistad revolt from an African 20thcentury perspective. The play deconstructs the process of assigning a preconceived
meaning to the African body: it is the “fundamental rights to freedom” that Africans are
entitled to in the “name of humanity and justice” (AKK 22). Shengbe, representing
Sierra Leonean identity, undergoes a ‘re-semanticisation’ that re-evaluates (his) African
identity which was erased a long time ago by colonial history. ”I was not born to be a
slave. So, it is better for me to die fighting than to live many moons in misery. And if I
am hanged, I will be happy if by dying, I will save my black race from bondage” (AKK
21). Amistad Kata-Kata generates “a new sense of national and historical belonging,”
confronting people with an “’available past’, a commemorative event belonging to the
people of Sierra Leone [...]”.xxxvi
i
Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American
Revolution,” The Oxford History oft he British Empire, vol. II, The Eighteenth Century,
ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 208-230. 209.
ii
Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American
Revolution” 212.
iii
Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American
Revolution” 208.
iv
J.R. Oldfield, “Transatlanticism, Slavery, and Race,“ American Literary Review 14.1
(Spring 2002): 131-140. 133.
v
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and
Abolition,” Representations 24, America Reconstructed, 1840-1940 (Autumn 1988):
28-59. 29.
vi
Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and
Abolition” 29.
vii
Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and
Abolition” 31.
viii
Kathleen Wilson, introduction, A New Imperial History. Culture, Identity and
Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004) 6.
ix
Joep Leerssen, “The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey,”
Poetics Today 21.2 (Summer 2000): 267-92. 280.
x
Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Between ’Oriental’ and ’Blacks So Called’, 1688-1788,” The
Postcolonial Enlightenment. Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory,
104
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
ed. Daniel Carey, and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 137-166.
165, 166.
xi
Ansgar Nünning, “Historicizing British Cultural Studies: Patriotic Xenophobia and
the Rhetoric of National Character in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, ” Journal
for the Study of British Cultures 9.1 (2002): 69-93. 83, 84.
xii
For a detailed account of Fawcett’s life see Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation.
Writings in the British Romantic Period, vol. 5, Drama, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 1999) 201-202.
xiii
Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) 17.
xiv
For more information about Charlie Haffner go to the homepage of the Freetong
Players International: http://freetongplayersinternational.org
xv
Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of
Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone (Athens and London: University of
Georgia Press, 2000) 110.
xvi
Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage. Representation of Slavery and the
Black Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 26.
xvii
Jeffrey N. Cox, introduction, John Fawcett, “Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack,” 1800,
Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation. Writings in the British Romantic Period, vol. 5,
Drama, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999) 201-202. 202.
xviii
John Fawcett, “Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack,“ 1800, Slavery, Abolition and
Emancipation. Writings in the British Romantic Period, vol. 5, Drama, ed. Jeffrey N.
Cox (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999) 203-219. 211.
xix
In “Songs, Duets, & Choruses, In the Pantomimical Drama of Obi, or, Three-Finger’s
Jack” it is mentioned that Jack’s three-fingered hand is also cut off.
xx
According to John O’Brien, “pantomimes were typically referred to as
‘entertainments’”, understood as a form of entertainment rather than a process of moral
education, hence “a form of entertainment that was taken by many to constitute a threat
to the integrity of the English stage.” (Harlequin Britain. Pantomime and
Entertainment, 1690-1760 (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2004) xv, 36.)) The reason why it was perceived as a threat was that the characters were
mute, a fact that “enabled the audience to more easily encode onto the role their preexisting racial perspective, arguably reproducing race within their pre-conceived
stereotypes […].” (David Worrall, The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787-1832:
The Road to the Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 98.)
xxi
“This Obi...has its origin, like many Customs among the Africans, from the ancient
Egyptians. Obi for the purpose of bewitching People, or consuming them by lingering
illness, is made of grave dirt, hair, teeth of sharks, and other animals.” (John Fawcett,
“Songs, Duets, & Choruses, In the Pantomimical Drama of Obi, or, Three-Finger’s
Jack“, 3rd ed. (London: Woodfall, 1800) 2. ECCO. University of Munich Lib. Web. 6
April 2011.
xxii
Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage. Representation of Slavery and the Black
Character 26.
xxiii
Passages of this section have been published in Ulrich Pallua, “Amistad Kata-Kata:
A Re-Evaluation of the Materiality of the Body,” Afrika – Kontinent der Extreme?
Edition Weltordnung - Religion – Gewalt, vol. 9 (Innsbruck: iup, 2011) 245-258.
xxiv
Osagie, The Amistad Revolt 107.
105
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
xxv
Charlie Haffner, Amistad Kata-Kata (Based on the True Story of the Amistad
Revolt). A Play in Three Acts (Freetown: Sierra Leone, 1987) Unpublished. 1. Hereafter
referred to as AKK in parenthetical documentation.
xxvi
Helen Gilbert, and Joanne Tompkins, Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice,
Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) 206.
xxvii
I am here referring to Chimamanda Adichie’s definition of a single story and the
dangers associated with it:
http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html
xxviii
Gilbert and Tompkins, Post-colonial Drama 222.
xxix
Gilbert and Tompkins, Post-colonial Drama 205.
xxx
Osagie, “Historical Memory and a New National Consciousness” 65.
xxxi
Osagie, “Historical Memory and a New National Consciousness” 66.
xxxii
Matthew J. Christensen, “Cannibals in the Postcolony: Sierra Leone’s Intersecting
Hegemonies in Charlie Haffner’s Slave Revolt Drama ‘Amistad Kata-Kata,’” Research
in African Literature 36.1 (Spring 2005): 1-19. 3.
xxxiii
Christensen, “Cannibals in the Postcolony” 11.
xxxiv
Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, “Historical Memory and a New National Consciousness:
The Amistad Revolt Revisited in Sierra Leone,” The Massachusetts Review 38.1
(Spring 1997): 63-83. 65.
xxxv
Osagie, “Historical Memory and a New National Consciousness” 66.
xxxvi
Osagie, “Historical Memory and a New National Consciousness” 77.
Ulrich Pallua is Assistant Professor at Innsbruck University, Austria. He completed his
Ph.D. on Eurocentrism, Racism, Colonialism in the Victorian and Edwardian Age in
2005. He worked on a project entitled “Slavery and English Literature: 1772-1834”
funded by the Austrian Research Council focussing on the image of African slaves in
different literary genres. His publications include The Acceptance of the Evils of Slavery
as a Social Phenomenon: an Indicator of a Pro-Slavery Approach (2007), Images of
Africans in British Slavery Discourse: Pro- and Anti-Slave Trade/Slavery Voices in The
Gentlemans Magazine and The Monthly Review, 1772-1833 (2009), (Re)Figuring
Human Enslavement: Images of Power, Violence and Resistance (2009), The Ambiguity
of Europe’s Colonizing Mission. The Subservient Slave in James Miller’s Play Art and
Nature, 1738 (2010), and Racism, Slavery, and Literature co-edited with Wolfgang
Zach (2010), Amistad Kata-Kata: A Re-Evaluation of the Materiality of the Body
(2011), Anti-Slave Trade Propaganda in 1788: The African’s Complaint in Contrast to
Britain’s Vision of Liberty? (2011). Contrasting Group Identities: Africa and Corrupted
Europe vs. Britain as the Pioneer of Human Rights in Paul and Virginia (2012). His
habilitation research is entitled Images of Africa(ns): The Character of the African Slave
in Selected Plays from the Abolition Period: 1772-1838.
106